Kurt Brockett

What happened to the Ice Cream Trucks?

kurtbrockett — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 15:09:29 +0000

On the Johnnycupcakes blog they posted the clip below of Eddie Murphy and his Ice Cream truck skit. I have such fond memories of the Ice Cream truck especially at my Nama and Pa’s house. My Pa would always get a chocolate malt and buy us a couple of balsa wood airplanes in addition to whatever kind of ice cream we wanted. The airplanes lasted about 3 minutes but the memories last forever.

Now it seems like Ice Cream Trucks are super shady operations. Here’s wishing they were awesome again.

Enjoy! [language NSFW]

World Cup 2010 – Pub Reactions

kurtbrockett — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:03:07 +0000

Right after the amazing 91st minute goal by the USA v. Algeria this past week I tweeted what you see above. Now less than a week later someone has delivered on my desire to see the pub reactions from around the world. With a nod to Frog Design Mind where I found the link, I give you pub reactions. BTW – My favorite part is definately the guy who picks up the chair for no reason in the first video. I could see myself doing just that.

Cool workflow video – good backup tips

kurtbrockett — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:35:39 +0000

Ever since working at Roxio I have a deep appreciation for backup strategies. I had never had a hard drive fail on me but finally experienced that curse a few weeks ago on my home machine. Specifically on the drive where I keep all our pictures and documents. Luckily I make weekly backups to another drive and bi-weekly/monthly offsite backups. Now the backup methods talked about in this video are a bit extreme for a home user but the concepts and failsafes in place easily replicate to a home or amateur user.

The Chase Jarvis blog has an extended writeup and I’ve embedded the video below.

Windows Phone 7 Metro Design UI Book – PDF

kurtbrockett — Sat, 08 May 2010 15:42:22 +0000

originally posted to /forward

I don’t remember where I found this link and when I went to go find it again via search it seems to have disappeared. Luckily I had it saved. Long Zheng posted a photo tour of the book from MIX10. I created a link on my iPad directly to this and it makes a cool little book to “read” or share via the slate. I’ve updated my Windows Phone 7 Links + Info post with this.

Here is the direct link to the PDF: Windows Phone 7 Metro Design UI Book PDF

Windows Phone 7 – Bytes by MSDN interview from MIX10

kurtbrockett — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 17:28:59 +0000

originally posted to /forward

Had a great opportunity to do an interview at MIX10 with the Bytes by MSDN team. We covered a bunch of topics from touch to XAML based technologies to the introduction of Silverlight as the platform for Windows Phone 7. And after the video if you are wondering, we are in fact team Jacob in the Brockett household so I luckily guessed correctly.

Ride Pix

kurtbrockett — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 23:19:54 +0000

It’s February and that means my Triathlon season is a few weeks in. Even though my first race isn’t until the end of March I usually get going towards the end of January. What’s great about all the new smart phones is they have great cameras. This gives me an opportunity to share some of the cool and interesting things I see out when riding. Below is a few pix from previous rides and I’ll try and get better at taking some cools shots around the East Bay. Enjoy.

Ride out on Calavares Road in Sunol

Top of Patterson Pass Road – Looking out to Tracy

Climb out Mines Road in Livermore towards Lake Del Valle

NRF Follow Up

kurtbrockett — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:13:33 +0000

originally posted to /forward

Well it was definitely an exhausting week between CES and NRF. My plan to sleep on the plane from Las Vegas to New York didn’t quite work out as planned. Flying JetBlue with DirectTV during the Jets v. Bengals playoff game and a plane full of New Yorkers resulted in a pretty rambunctious flight. NRF was an incredible show and a big win for IdentityMine. The Microsoft Retail team brought a bunch of great customers by. Checkout the video posted on the Surface blog below. One correction is that the Microsoft Tag application is not yet available for Android.

Thanks everyone at IdentityMine who worked so hard on the application and to all those who stopped by the Microsoft Retail booth.

Incarnate #FTW

kurtbrockett — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 19:02:38 +0000

Watched the flood of news this morning from the visitmix.com team and thought I would jump on the Incarnate bandwagon. So I’ve downloaded the plugin and installed. This is the first post after it’s been activated so if you want to see it in action go ahead and comment. Interested to see how it looks in my template. May have to do some hacking.

[UPDATE 2] – Version 1.1 is now out and it solves the issue called out in [UPDATE 1]

[UPDATE 1] – So only one change was needed to get everything working on my blog. The directory the .js is looking for in the .zip is wp-incarnate. When you upload the plugin from the .zip it is named incarnate-for-wordpress. So just change the directory name and reactivate and you should be good to go. Here’s a screenshot:

Links to Incarnate Info:

Incarnate on VisitMix.com – project page

Incarnate Introduction Post

Incarnate WordPress Post

Incarnate Channel9 Video

Salesforce Add-In and Outlook 2010 Beta 2 – Not Ready

kurtbrockett — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:32:54 +0000

This past week at PDC2009 Microsoft announced the availability of Office 2010 Beta 2. Being the eager tech guy I downloaded and upgraded my Office 2007 install. Overall it looks like a great upgrade. I use the Salesforce.com Add-In though to interface with our CRM system and unfortunately the Add-In has to be disabled for Outlook to run. Here’s a thread on the issue on the Salesforce.com support site (link). When there’s updates I’ll post back but until then it’s back to 2007 for me.

PDC09 Day -5: Sessions!

kurtbrockett — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:45:14 +0000

originally post to /forward

A main attraction no doubt for PDC is the sessions. Hear details on current and upcoming platforms directly from the Microsoft teams that live and breath the technology every day. For our readers on /forward they are most likely interested in WPF, Silverlight and Windows 7 focused sessions. Well in an attempt to stay current in my daily countdown and to show some love for our FOIM (Friend of IdentityMine) Walt Ritscher I thought I’d highlight his most recent set of posts. In the posts below, Walt has highlighted a handful of sessions in our target technologies. Enjoy! and thanks Walt.

WPF Wonderland Blog by Walt Ritscher

WPF Content at PDC 09 – (link)

Silverlight Content for PDC 09 – (link)

Graphic and Windows content at PDC 09 – (link)